Nicolas Gombert was a musical genius whose emotional complexity allowed him to write music unlike that of any other Renaissance composer. A member of the generation between Josquin and Palestrina, he took the polyphonic style to its highest state of perfection. This recording brings together many of his best-known works, including the first of his eight Magnificats, the eight-voiced Credo, and Tulerunt Dominum, some of the most memorable music of the period.

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If you view musical history as a sequence of styles, each
one a consequence of its predecessor, then Gombert’s
music takes the transparent consonances of Josquin’s
generation and muddies the harmonic waters in
preparation for the rich late-sixteenth-century
polyphonic style of Palestrina’s generation. Gombert
and his contemporaries thus become an important if
rather unglamorous link between the Low and the High
Renaissance. There is nothing wrong with this view
unless, however, you venture to believe that the
achievements of Gombert’s generation are technically
the most accomplished, and musically the most exciting,
of the Renaissance. Gombert was not a minor character
on the musical time-line between Josquin and
Palestrina; on the contrary, he was a musical genius
whose emotional complexity and inherent selfcontradictions
allowed him to write music unlike that of
any other Renaissance composer.

While it is relatively easy to love Gombert’s music,
one certainly cannot love Gombert the man since he was
a pederast. Gombert violated a young boy while serving
in the chapel of the Emperor Charles V as a result of
which he was banished to the galleys. After some time
in exile on the high seas, however, Gombert’s
compositional accomplishments led to an Emperor’s
pardon. The music that led directly to Gombert’s rescue
from oblivion was a series of eight Magnificats, the first
of which is presented here. Self-confident and robust,
this Dorian-mode canticle leaves no doubt as to the
power of Gombert’s persuasive personality. As each
polyphonic section alternates with the Magnificat
plainchant, the vocal disposition changes. The fourvoice
writing of the first two polyphonic verses is
reduced to three voices at ‘Fecit potentiam’. Thereafter
a voice is added at ‘Esurientes’, another at ‘Sicut locutus
est’, and finally, after a magnificently handled florid
cadence, another one at ‘Sicut locutus est’. With six
voices in play Gombert is unstoppable, and he knows it.
This musically unrepentant style is in marked contrast to
the sensitively experimental style of the motets which
pre-date Gombert’s conviction. Works like the resonant
six-voiced Media vita and the Epitaphium to his mentor
Josquin show a deeply self-conscious exploration of
dark texts by a composer with a unique ear for vocal
texture. To a certain extent both of these works are
autobiographical. In the Epitaph Gombert shows off his
low-textured Flemish heritage and his ability to enhance
those low textures with painful harmonic twists, most
notably to paint the harshness of death at the words
‘severa morte’. In the final section of this Epitaph, the
pupil’s pastiche of his teacher’s outmoded style is
breathtakingly adept and poignant: at the words
‘Josquinus inquit’ (Josquin speaks) Gombert suddenly
turns the musical clock back four decades, and in an
instant the musical complexity of the mid-century
dilemma is replaced by the rose-tinted simplicity of
Gombert’s youth, where clear imitation, rocking
haemiolas, and modal harmony offer much-needed
security. Self-pity and harsh self-analysis are even more
evident in Media vita where Gombert finds himself
emotionally dead, or dormant, at least, while yet in the
midst of life. Media vita is a Renaissance masterpiece
whose emotional darkness is handed down directly
through the Ockeghem-Josquin line.

The best-known compositions in this collection are
the eight-voiced Credo and Tulerunt Dominum; indeed
these two pieces share much of the same music.
Tulerunt Dominum was evidently a well-loved piece in
Gombert’s day since it survives in no fewer than four
other versions (as a secular song to the French words Je
prens congié, as the Latin motets Sustinuimus pacem
and Lugebat David Absalon, and in its earliest version
J’ay mis mon cueur). Tulerunt might these days be
described as minimalist because of its insistence on the
repetition of small fragments of music, most notably in
its setting of the word ‘Alleluia’ whenever it appears.
Indeed, the closing bars of this motet are some of the
most insistently memorable of the period. The setting of
the Credo takes the musical gem that is Tulerunt and
uses it to construct a fully-formed Renaissance crown.
The Credo is a treatise in how to write for eight voices:
Gombert takes a few fragments of musical material and
scatters them around his choir with breathtaking
virtuosity. No combination of voices is ever the same
twice, and Gombert’s kaleidoscopic textural display
only ends because the text itself runs out. This isolated
Mass movement shows a composer who is able to
control sounds and colours in a way which one normally
only associates with innovative orchestrators such as
Berlioz and Debussy. In particular, the emotionally
charged ‘Et incarnatus est’ section is a model of textural
pacing which dwarfs the accomplishments of most
composers of any era. At the other end of the spectrum
are the four-voiced motets Super flumina Babylonis and
Salve Regina which show the introspective side of
Gombert’s character. In the former, Psalm 136 tells of
the Babylonian Exile (‘By the waters of Babylon we sat
down and wept’) and was an obvious narrative choice
for Gombert the nostalgic. Gombert revisits the
haunting harmonies of his childhood (‘dum
recordaremur’) while antique musical instruments sway
precariously in the late-medieval breeze (‘suspendimus
organa’). But later on, the acid jeers of the captors
(‘Sing us one of your songs’) and the sardonic repost of
the prisoners (‘How can we sing in a strange land?’)
were to have horrific personal resonances for Gombert
during his own exile; the sudden major mode ending of
Super flumina Babylonis is quite exceptionally bitter,
even by Gombert’s standards. The Salve Regina is a
more redemptive work and represents one of the finest
contrapuntal achievements of any age. Gombert weaves
seven plainchant melodies (‘diversi diversa orant’) of
the Blessed Virgin Mary into a highly compact piece of
polyphony whose simple beauty betrays nothing of the
technical facility that underpins it. The effect is of
snatches of Marian melodies floating effortlessly into
(and out of) one’s consciousness. This ability to conceal
the intricate workings of his mind was at one and the
same time Gombert’s musical strength and his personal
weakness.

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